5 ms·

> I would not recommend doing this unless you have a really good idea what running a public facing smtpd involves in the year 2021 for full email deliverability

> I would not recommend doing this unless you have a really good idea what running a public facing smtpd involves in the year 2021 for full email deliverability to/from all destinations. It isn't nearly as bad as your post would suggest. There are plenty of reputable service providers, and plenty of software other than sendmail. > you need an unimpeachable clean section of IP space, which these days means working with a more traditional ISP that will cost you a lot more for service per month No, it means working with a reputable service provider. I picked up a VPS from RackNerd. The worst I had to do was fill out a Spamhaus form one time. And that's just because Spamhaus is rubbish themselves. > Like, not a $5 to $25/mo VPS I pay $23/year. > And that's before you get into a proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup. These are the least difficult parts of setting up email service. SPF is a simple DNS TXT record; MX Toolbox provides a record generator[0]. DMARC is also a TXT record[1], even simpler than SPF. For DKIM, things like OpenDKIM exist; Digital Ocean describes how to set it up with Postfix[2]. > I don't see a need for a new third thing that's apparently not designed for large scale production use The internet is for everyone. Not everyone is a university. [0]: https://mxtoolbox.com/SPFRecordGenerator.aspx https://mxtoolbox.com/SPFRecordGenerator.aspx [1]: https://dmarc.org/overview/ https://dmarc.org/overview/ [2]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-dkim-with-postfix-on-debian-wheezy https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...

walrus01 5y ago
1) congratulations, you won the VPS provider lottery for something with clean IP space. you're totally confident it will remain that way? in my experience, hosting services that any random person can buy with $5/mo and a credit card on the internet will inevitably lose its IP space reputation. The margins are too thin in the hosting game for a company to provide personal, human, granular attention to eliminating every spammer. 2) no, openDKIM isn't hard to set up with (for instance, postfix). and neither is properly configured SPF, DMARC, etc. But it's more than 99.9% of email users want to get into. If you're already really confident doing intermediate level linux/bsd sysadmin stuff? sure, knock yourself out, overall it's just another daemon with some text based configuration files, and plenty of good reference material out the on the internet. If you're determined to do that you're better off with a real IMAP server setup, I recommend dovecot, than whatever this small project is in the linked URL. And then if you want webmail, either rainloop or roundcube. Or just set up a proper IMAP-over-TLS client on all your devices so you don't need webmail.
- dqv 5y ago
  I think DigitalOcean does a pretty good job on managing IP reputation. When setting up my account with Microsoft's feedback loop, DO was already registered as a steward of my droplet IP. It turns out DO doesn't want to be seen as spam-lenient.
  - gingerlime 5y ago
    last I checked DigitalOcean completely blocked port 25 on their droplets.
    - dqv 5y ago
      Mailinabox uses port 587
      - gingerlime 5y ago
        is this working with all ESPs ? It was enough of a reason for me to switch my mail server to Linode.
        dqv 5y ago
        As far as I can tell. Yahoo (and yahoo-like), Microsoft, Google all accepting our mail with no problems. Nothing is going to spam either.
- raegis 5y ago
  > 1) congratulations, you won the VPS provider lottery I'm not the person you are responding to, but honestly it's not that hard. I used to subscribe to a VPS which recycled its IPs formerly used by spammers, but now I use a company which is way more vigilant about blocking spammers. Not all IP ranges are rife with spammers, so all you need to do is run cheap tests with a few VPS companies to find a good solution.
  - yuppie_scum 5y ago

walrus01 5y ago

1) congratulations, you won the VPS provider lottery for something with clean IP space. you're totally confident it will remain that way? in my experience, hosting services that any random person can buy with $5/mo and a credit card on the internet will inevitably lose its IP space reputation. The margins are too thin in the hosting game for a company to provide personal, human, granular attention to eliminating every spammer. 2) no, openDKIM isn't hard to set up with (for instance, postfix). and neither is properly configured SPF, DMARC, etc. But it's more than 99.9% of email users want to get into. If you're already really confident doing intermediate level linux/bsd sysadmin stuff? sure, knock yourself out, overall it's just another daemon with some text based configuration files, and plenty of good reference material out the on the internet. If you're determined to do that you're better off with a real IMAP server setup, I recommend dovecot, than whatever this small project is in the linked URL. And then if you want webmail, either rainloop or roundcube. Or just set up a proper IMAP-over-TLS client on all your devices so you don't need webmail.

dqv 5y ago
I think DigitalOcean does a pretty good job on managing IP reputation. When setting up my account with Microsoft's feedback loop, DO was already registered as a steward of my droplet IP. It turns out DO doesn't want to be seen as spam-lenient.
- gingerlime 5y ago
  last I checked DigitalOcean completely blocked port 25 on their droplets.
  - dqv 5y ago
    Mailinabox uses port 587
    - gingerlime 5y ago
      is this working with all ESPs ? It was enough of a reason for me to switch my mail server to Linode.
      - dqv 5y ago
        As far as I can tell. Yahoo (and yahoo-like), Microsoft, Google all accepting our mail with no problems. Nothing is going to spam either.
raegis 5y ago
> 1) congratulations, you won the VPS provider lottery I'm not the person you are responding to, but honestly it's not that hard. I used to subscribe to a VPS which recycled its IPs formerly used by spammers, but now I use a company which is way more vigilant about blocking spammers. Not all IP ranges are rife with spammers, so all you need to do is run cheap tests with a few VPS companies to find a good solution.
- yuppie_scum 5y ago